Maybe say goodnight outside your child’s bedroom
Messy, smelly, bedrooms do not seem very inviting for a peaceful night’s sleep. However, a lot of children and teenagers sleep in such rooms with smelly clothes, food scraps, dirt, dust and clutter.
The question for the parents is to decide what is acceptable and then explain, in detail, to your child/teenager how the room is expected to look and smell. The standard you expect has to be age appropriate.
There are 5 ways to help the new bedroom come alive!
Assist your child to get the room to the level you expect it to stay. Work on the room together.
Make the room easy to maintain. For example have a laundry basket, a rubbish bin and organised shelves or containers. One container could be for paper and pens, the other for hats, the other for dvds etc.
Explain the consequences if the room is not kept to the standard explained. For example, you could say the room will be checked every Saturday and if the room is kept to standard you will vacuum the floor on the weekend. However, if the room fails to kept properly the child/teenager will vacuum their own room and other rooms in the house. Other privileges could be taken away such as ipods or sport privileges. The idea is not to take away a privilege like an ipod for too long..it is important to give opportunities for improvement. Maybe it just goes away until the room is cleaned.
Explain also the problem with keeping a smelly, dirty room. Food scraps invite mice and rats and cockroaches. And maybe go into great detail about rats chewing ipod cords and dvd cords and mobile phone cords etc!!!!
If the room is mostly tidy but one thing is a problem – like uneaten lunches being thrown in the cupboard or under the bed! A way to tackle this type of issue might be to talk about it as an issue on its own and not about the bedroom being involved. Maybe asked what is preferred for lunch. Explain that the only bins that can be used for food are the kitchen bins. Try and find out why the lunch isn’t being eaten. Maybe a reward system of tuckshop due to food being eaten and/or disposed of correctly.
Goodluck 
Caz says
Lunches for school can require a bit of thought to make them interesting.
Cec says
An excellent blog Shaz. Maybe my lunches were too boring in those days.
Shaz says
Thank you. Oh lunches are a constant battle with all parents!!!
Dave C says
Cec
Nice to see a new reader on Shaz’s blog willing to express their opinion – good on you!
Some things we really don’t appreciate until we are adults and have kids of our own 🙁 If someone were to make my lunch everyday now I would devour it! Rather than your lunches being boring I think that your kids may have had other distractions or lunch time activities which took priority over their sandwiches and fruit. Perhaps hiding their lunch under the bed was a subconscious behaviour by the child who may feel less guilty about doing that as opposed to just throwing it in the bin, which could be perceived by them as a huge sign of disrespect and waste of lovingly prepared food???? So I think that you should take their behaviour as an indication that your lunches were good enough to keep and collect even if they couldn’t or wouldn’t be eaten 🙂
I wonder what would have happened if one day you just stopped making them lunch, they probably would not have coped well at all? hahaha
Dave
Shaz says
Yes the lunch making process is quite personal. People feel loved when they think of the time someone has gone to..to make sure they had a healthy lunch. Sometimes a little note to say enjoy is cute too!!!